TEXTS & IMAGES

On
the Surplus Value of a DreamSyrago
Tsiara, March 25 2013

The Greek pavilion at this year’s
Venice Biennale is hosting History Zero, by Stefanos Tsivopoulos, a film in
three parts accompanied by an archive of texts and images. The film depicts the
experiences of three very different people, with very different conceptions of
the value of money, and explores the role of money in human relations and the
political and social dimensions of either having it or not having it.

The archival material accompanying the
film contains examples and testimonies of alternative, non-monetary exchange
systems. The archive focuses on the ability of such models to erode and throw
into question the homogenizing political power of a single currency, pointing
to ways in which, in difficult times, societies can by-pass a monetary economy
altogether and use a system of exchange based on goods and services.

History Zero comes at an especially
critical historical time, when Greece and the other countries of the European
South are suffering more than anywhere else from tectonic shifts in the
international distribution of wealth and power. The threat from emerging
economic powers such as China and India, has lead to the subversion of labour
relations, the rapid impoverishment of the population and widening inequality
between regions within Europe. History shows us, however, that every crisis
creates the opportunity for new meanings to emerge in our relationships to each
other and to our environment. It is precisely on this cusp, at this time of
rupture and change, that the narrative of History Zero is situated. It attempts
to see our relationship to money poetically, putting it in a broader
philosophical perspective, beyond the usual moralising recriminations about
corruption, clientelism, consumerism and illusions of prosperity. At the same
time it proposes dynamic ways to reaffirm solidarity, cooperation and
coresponsibility in response to the present crisis and envisioning the future.

History 1

An elderly art collector lives all
alone in her museum-like house surrounded by works of modern art. Suffering
from dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease, she has a very peculiar, personal way
of organising and attributing meaning to objects, based mainly on touch. Her
favourite activity is making origami flowers. But instead of paper she uses
one, two and five euro banknotes. As her fingers turn them into flowers their
monetary value is replaced by their value as colour, material, and shape. From
time to time the old lady, dissatisfied by her creation, throws the flowers
into a rubbish bag and starts on new ones.

History 2

A young immigrant from Africa wanders
around in the streets of Athens pushing a supermarket trolley and collecting
scrap metal. For him, finding and collecting this discarded and worthless
material is the only way to survive. In his hands, scrap iron becomes ‘gold’.
It is hard, tiring work. An accidental find, a garbage bag full of banknotes,
folded in the shape of flowers, changes his life. He abandons the supermarket
trolley, takes the bag of money and leaves.

History 3

An artist wanders around the centre of
Athens seeking inspiration for a new artwork in the confusing landscape of the
city. He observes and records street scenes at random with his iPad. He sees
the city and the people through digital representations as fragmentary, random
images. A snapshot attracts his attention: an abandoned supermarket trolley
full of scrap metal. A perfect objet trouvé!

It could be transformed into the
central piece of his next exhibition.

History 0

History 0 has a different form and
narrative. It is an archive of texts and images about alternative economic
systems which manage to avoid the use of a single currency, such as communities
which invent their own money, adapt the dominant economic system, or organise
self-managed associations for the exchange of products and services in order to
deal with the severe problems of survival during a recession.

Stefanos
Tsivopoulos in conversation with Katerina GregosApril
2013

Katerina Gregos: For the majority of
the artists of your generation, video/film is but one of the media they employ.
You have opted to work exclusively in this medium. What led to that decision?
What is the attraction of the medium for you? What do you consider its
advantages as well as challenges?

Stefanos Tsivopoulos: It started in a
simple way while still at the academy with a simple Hi8 digital camera but it
developed very fast, coinciding with the development of the “camera industry”.
With almost every new project, I could use a new, “better” camera, better
software to edit the material, and so on. For me digital video was the back
door to enter the “secrets” of cinema and film —a way of making and learning
things by myself. I didn’t use any cinema ‘textbooks’ but learned largely by
trial and error. Along the way there where good and bad results but it helped
me a lot to personalize the medium by becoming a “one man band”, i.e. script
writer, director, producer, cameraman, editor, sound man, etc., and to develop
a personal rhythm and attitude towards the treatment of the moving image. In
general this process has changed the way I thought about art. The immediacy and
directness of the medium is its greatest attribute but at the same time its
greatest weakness as it doesn’t always allow for deep reflection and
elaboration.

KG:
Your
work deploys and deliberately conflates several filmic and televisual
strategies: the documentary, docu-fiction, as well as cinematic elements, for
example. How do you relate to each of these genres and situate them within your
own practice, and what are the elements you borrow from each?

ST: I mainly
relate to images and visual language as form and less to genres. Whether
cinema, documentary or docu-fiction, images tell their own stories and that’s
mainly whatI have been concerned with in my practicein so far. The strategies
you’re referring to are mainly those of imitation, representation and exposure.
Cinema and television often conceal their techniques in favour of privileging the
message, whereas in many of my works the process or technique by which
televisionis constructed becomes the content. I am thus mainly concerned with
the structure, or language if you prefer, of the moving image and how the
language that is so constructed gains credibility. I’d like here to draw
attentionto what I find fascinating in moving image and image-making in
general: the aura of authenticity. Whether cinema or television, documentary,
fiction and/or other forms, image making and the moving image in particular is
concerned with the way the dramatization, documentation, or even the
historicisation of events, creates an aura of authenticity. Media industries
are mainly concerned with whether the medium can dictate the message and not
the other way around.

KG:
When
you say you mainly relate to images, what kind of images are you referring to
and why?

ST: Yes. I
should perhaps replace the word ‘images’ with the word Image with a capital
“I”. Image stands for the surface of things, the representation of events and
the representation of a visual environment. Mainstream media, mainstream
cinema, television, even documentaries, etc., deploy a rather one-dimensional
format of story telling, which is identified easily. The strategy is a
monoform, to borrow Peter Watkins’ term. The hegemony, or dictation if you
prefer, of this ‘monoform’ has created a contemporary vocabulary of image
making that is very interesting to investigate. It is as if you were wandering
around in an artificial landscape with plastic trees and mountains made of
cardboard. Whether you make a documentary or cinema the differences are very
small, in my opinion. It depends on the way you charge the film with this aura
of authenticity. In my early works all this was the main topic of research.

KG:
If
media (TV and commercial cinema) are ‘monoform’ as systems of communication
(Watkins cites rapidly editing pictures, displacing the viewer from one subject
and image to another, and the ceaseless barrage of visual and audio information
directed towards the viewer in a one way ‘mono-linear’ push as examples of
monoform) what is the artistic antidote from your point of view and from the
point of view of the ‘artist’s film’ as a distinctly separate genre?

ST: I would say
it is a multiform, if I may call it like this, which is, to a certain extent,
the nature of all art as well. The work of Watkins is great both in terms of
its oeuvre and importance and he is an inspirational figure for many artists.
He does not set preconditions in the way he does cinema or, rather, in the way
he treats moving images and narratives. The intentions with which an artist
constructs images and narratives are crucial. I’m always asking myself whether
the decisions I take for my films are usually based on what I want to say. So the
antidote is not really one single recipe. When I talk about a multiform the
antidote is the artist’s method and language and there can be as many antidotes
as there are artists. However, to come back to what you call the “artist’s
film”. What we call ‘artist’s film’ engages a very wide scope of aesthetics,
techniques and articulations. However, there is a conflict that arises from the
nature and history of film as a mass public spectacle on the one hand and the
nature of art that is more exclusive, detached from the masses on the other. Or
perhaps one could call this a conflict of hierarchies. Video, however, is a
very democratic, liberating and powerful tool because of its immediacy and the
broadness of its output. It changed the way artists do art, it changed the way
we look at images and that in turn has changed what we can expect from art.
From political ads to war coverage to Youtube videos, to the leaked drone
footage in Wikileaks, to film, it’s all part of a democratic medium that has
democratized the world and art as well.

ST: Yes. I
should perhaps replace the word ‘images’ with the word Image with a capital
“I”. Image stands for the surface of things, the representation of events and
the representation of a visual environment. Mainstream media, mainstream
cinema, television, even documentaries, etc., deploy a rather one-dimensional
format of story telling, which is identified easily. The strategy is a
monoform, to borrow Peter Watkins’ term. The hegemony, or dictation if you
prefer, of this ‘monoform’ has created a contemporary vocabulary of image
making that is very interesting to investigate. It is as if you were wandering
around in an artificial landscape with plastic trees and mountains made of
cardboard. Whether you make a documentary or cinema the differences are very
small, in my opinion. It depends on the way you charge the film with this aura
of authenticity. In my early works all this was the main topic of research.

KG:
If
media (TV and commercial cinema) are ‘monoform’ as systems of communication
(Watkins cites rapidly editing pictures, displacing the viewer from one subject
and image to another, and the ceaseless barrage of visual and audio information
directed towards the viewer in a one way ‘mono-linear’ push as examples of
monoform) what is the artistic antidote from your point of view and from the
point of view of the ‘artist’s film’ as a distinctly separate genre?

ST: I would say
it is a multiform, if I may call it like this, which is, to a certain extent,
the nature of all art as well. The work of Watkins is great both in terms of
its oeuvre and importance and he is an inspirational figure for many artists.
He does not set preconditions in the way he does cinema or, rather, in the way
he treats moving images and narratives. The intentions with which an artist
constructs images and narratives are crucial. I’m always asking myself whether
the decisions I take for my films are usually based on what I want to say. So the
antidote is not really one single recipe. When I talk about a multiform the
antidote is the artist’s method and language and there can be as many antidotes
as there are artists. However, to come back to what you call the “artist’s
film”. What we call ‘artist’s film’ engages a very wide scope of aesthetics,
techniques and articulations.

Stefanos
Tsivopoulos and the Fiscal UnconsciousGregory
Sholette, March 30 2013

Think of capital’s endless mutability.
Fixed machinery, cost-saving technologies, credit card accounts, immaterial
financial instruments, hyper-fast digital trades, commodities that are useful,
useless, or ridiculous, even productive labor itself is according to Marx a type
of commodity and therefore capital, but what really comes to mind first when we
try to visualize this frustratingly abstract yet inescapable thing? No doubt
all that is solid capitalism melts into air, and yet our image of capital
itself always starts with a fixation on cold, hard cash.

Call it bread, bucks,
dough, Benjamins, lettuce, greenbacks, smackers, loot, loonies, leptons, quids,
coppers, silvers, Massari, moola, or pineapples, the money-form of capital
generates more lexical permutations, more absurd monikers than it could ever
possesses as a medium of financial investment. Paradoxically, many street names
for commonplace currency invoke a state of triviality, baseness, or an absence
of intrinsic value. The Russians call a thousand rubles shtuka (штука), which
means a unit or “thing,” in Latin America Lana can mean both money and a
peasant, the word cash for Germans is synonymous with mice or coal (die Mäuse,
die kohle). Lucre is usually preceded by the adjective filthy. Slid “under the
table,” stashed in “slush funds,” or used to facilitate the type of monetary
arrangements better kept out of sight, money is treated with a mixture of
fascination and embarrassment.

Money may indeed be dirty, but it does
not prevent us from endowing it with a magical, Faustian agency. Sex, drugs,
guns, contraband, even “friends” are attainable through its agency. In the
right quantity it can be used to save a life, or to end one. But money as a
form in itself has vulnerabilities. Coins exposed to human sweat handily tarnish,
dent, eventually actually losing their face (though not their value). Bills are
scribbled upon, folded over, torn, stained by food, drink, and bodily fluids.
They eventually disintegrate as a consequence of human contact.

Human time is
directly encoded on the surface of money. A bank note’s barely readable
inscription exudes traces of history with a small “h.” We wonder, who signed
this? Under what circumstances? And from where is its value drawn? Cash is the
ultimate archive. By contrast capital appears disconnected from human desire
and indifferent to social memory.

Focusing on
historical and contemporary applications of alternative social experiments, the
archive stands as a clear political statement. It intentionally covers a wide
range of cultural and anthropological records.

It starts with a display of
contemporary models of local exchange systems (LETS), then goes on to a system
of cash transfer using pre-paid mobile phone minutes that is evolving as a form
of alternative currency (Mobile Money) in parts of Africa. It then takes us to
the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation in Japan which is organised around the exchange
of services to elderly people, and learn about the experiment of zero rupee
notes in India invented by activists as a way of fighting widespread
corruption.

Each unit of the archive presents a
selected anthology of textual and visual documentation resulting from the
study, collection and processing of historical and anthropological material.
The units are organised museologically, the heterogeneous material handled with
equality, thus activating the viewer’s perception, critical approach and
interpretation.

The archive is at the centre of the
installation. It is the zero point which implies not the end, but a point of
departure, of upturn: the beginning of something new. It reinforces the
alternative thinking and the concepts negotiated by the film, providing
material which feeds into the intellectual experience of the work. It occupies
a key position directly opposite the pavilion entrance, and is thus both the
starting point and the finishing point of the visitors’ walk through the
separate sections of the work. The arrangement of the films in three different
rooms around the archive is designed to enhance the flow back and forth between
the stillness of the archival information and the movement of the cinematic
image.

The politics of memory

The appropriation of traces from the
past and their transcription into a new narrative somewhere between documentary
and fiction is a constant of Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ work. For him, documentary
and fiction are not bipolar opposites but related intellectual spheres that
contribute dialectically to the construction of a reality effect. In Remake
(2007) he explored television news as a technology for the creation of this
reality effect in the period of the Greek dictatorship (1967–74), and in
Amnesialand (2010), he focused on the way socio-economic mechanisms shifted the
interpretational framing of images from a commercial product to a historical
testimony in Murcia in south-eastern Spain at the beginning of the 20th century.
Similarly, in The Public Library of Borrowed Knowledge, presented at the International
Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in 2011, he displayed a
series of academic books and photographs from the socialist Czechoslovakia of
the 1960s, taking advantage of the opportunity for the re-signification of
material which he borrowed from his father’s library.

In his recent work The Future Starts
Here (2012), an in situ installation in an abandoned oil factory in the city of
Elefsina in Attica in southern Greece, the artist’s intention was to
demonstrate the political functions of both memory and oblivion. Combining
video, performance, and objects, with textual, photographic, televisual, and
cinematic archives he created a mosaic of images from the history of labour
protests, industrial development and de-industrialisation in modern Greece.
Through fragments of the past, material and human testimonies, he composed a
poetic manifesto, commenting on the causes of the crisis and how to transcend
it, based on material surrounding its creation and decline.

Whatever field of research he chooses,
Tsivopoulos’ work draws on the past, on collective and individual memory, on
the particularities of place and discourse in the public domain. His methods
have much in common with those of the historian, searching for material traces
of the past through thorough archival research, detecting and bringing to light
available visual resources, written and oral testimonies, and investigating his
subject by means of a comparative and interdisciplinary approach.

However, Tsivopoulos does not merely
aim at visually transcribing an established —or even an alternative— narrative
of the past. He rather focuses on the ways the past is visualized and acquires
the régime of truth. He treats visual documents as constructions mediated by
collective representations, as images that from their inception, structurally
incorporate diverse connotations and interpretations which mould to a great
extent not only our perception of “what really happened” but also how we define
our present and plan our future.

Aesthetics is only part of what makes
an artwork. I see it as a way of occasionally highlighting certain aspects of a
work but not as a method. I do not indulge in aesthetics. I go with the flow of
things and my videos or films are mainly in tune with my ideas. When aesthetics
help me to carry the message in a more clear way then I do see aesthetics as
content. I think in the end it’s about striking the right balance.

KG:
The
film-maker Isaac Julien once said something about this distinction between film
in media versus art that struck me. He said that in the over-saturated media
world that we live in sometimes video art is looked to as representing an
ethical position. Do you agree with this statement?

ST: In contrast
to spoken language, which we are adept at using in order to articulate or
communicate an idea, the same cannot be said of the language of video or film.
The medium has a power of its own to dictate the message. It is my impression
that we cannot control exactly the meaning or the message of art especially
when art enters the realm of every day life, so it will be contested and
challenged as well. I do agree that video art can be this area where an artist
can find a niche to express a deep research and a dedicated work related to the
moving image. However I do not think that video art as a medium could represent
an ethical position in its totality, but it is an area where different ethics
can be contested.

KG:
What
of the question of filmic aesthetics? To what extent is having a distinct
visuality important to you? So many artists today are fearful of creating
beautiful images because they mistakenly associate aesthetics with
superficiality. How would you describe your relationship to aesthetics, and
particularly to the aesthetics of film and documentary, which you filter and
interpret in your own way?

ST: Well, that’s
a big question for me, as well. I think I’m at the crossroads between art and
cinema at this point of my career. There are certain concepts in the arts that
I’m hesitant to come in terms with. For example, as you mentioned, issues of
distinct visual identity and/or aesthetics vs. content. Even though they might
be valid issues I do question their importance.

KG:
In
the last two years your work has, however, shifted away from the analysis of
media strategies of representation and cinema research and is now focusing on
the relation of images to what you call “the economy of a history”. Can you
elaborate more on this idea, also in relation to the current work for the Greek
Pavilion?

ST: Yes, indeed
it was about how but now it is more about why. How do we produce images, and
why do we produce images? Images as one of the highest valued commodities have
their place in providing evidence for both history and economy.

KG:
Your
work has also dealt with history, past history as well as history ‘in the
making’. We live in increasingly a-historic and amnesiac times. Eric Hobsbawm,
the great historian, pointed out the dangers of this by saying that ‘history
alone provides orientation, and anyone who faces the future without it is not
only blind but dangerous, especially in the era of high technology’. How do
relate to this comment as regards your work, which is both historically and
technologically aware?

ST: Well, I
believe the way we understand and interpret collective history is largely
dependent on personal history. When I first moved from Greece to the
Netherlands to study art, first at the Rietveld Academie and then at the
Rijksakademie, I was struggling to define – culturally and historically – what
it is that I do. Where does it belong? The simple question was, am I a Greek
artist or is being ‘an artist’ enough? And what does it mean to be a Greek
artist in the 2000s? What did it mean to be a Greek artist in the 90s, the 80s
etc? I realized the impact of politics on the way art and cultural production
was taking place in Greece. Politics has been interwoven with the history of
art in Greece ever since its independence in 1821. I started going back into
the past looking for history, my history, my country’s history. I simply wanted
to understand where I stood as an artist and the process led me to the reading
of history. One of the first things I researched into were the early images
that I was exposed to as I was growing up in a small town in Greece. There were
two types of images. On the one hand we had the Greek National Television (ERT)
that was heavily affected, shaped and stigmatized by the kitsch aesthetics of
the Greek Junta of a decade earlier and was responsible for the birth of
national television in Greece. And on the other hand I had my grandfather’s
images from the years of his political exile in Czechoslovakia. When the Greek
civil war ended in 1949 the defeated communists fled to countries of the former
USSR. I remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap as a toddler looking at
pictures of Brezhnev or going with him to the communist festivals of KNE
(Communist Youth of Greece) that were full of vivid images, banners, posters,
young people involved passionately in politics. These were my first images.
These hints about my past, which to a certain extent is part of a collective
past, is a by-product of history, I would even say of European history. Along
the way I found out that many people, and especially artists of my generation,
shared similar stories and this was when it became very interesting. I always
thought I had a slight detachment from the traditional social fabric of Greece
as my mother is Iranian and I was born in Prague. Nevertheless the political
times, and incidents that followed my parents in their lives, the exile and
cultural exclusion, proved crucial in shaping what I have become today as a
person and as an artist.

KG: And what of the relationship of history and politics in your work? Chris Marker
once remarked that he was passionate about History and that politics interested
him only insofar as the latter is the cross-section of
the history of the present? Do you feel that you relate to this point of view?

ST: My work
started as a search, an investigation into all the aforementioned issues but
not really knowing what exactly I was looking for. It was not clear in the
beginning and it’s not completely clear yet now either. But there are hints and
clues and that’s what makes my search more consistent and specific, bit by bit:
mainly by asking questions about history. For example the work Untitled (The
Remake) (2007) is a very good example of that approach. I was interested in exposing
the mechanisms, technological, aesthetical, and political, that dictated the
historicisation of certain images which propagated the political message and
power of the Greek Junta. I jumped into a huge subject and a big taboo for
Greek society. A public historical and political discourse, one that takes into
account the benefits of the reading of even the darkest pages of history, is
lacking support in Greece. The work was my first serious attempt to claim a new
sequence of images, a new narrative, from my confrontation with a historical
‘Master’ narrative. I worried a lot about whether the result was artistically
successful or not. But only now I realize that the significance of this early
work is precisely in its rupture with an untouchable and rigid scheme of
historical representation, and to engage with what Guy Debord calls unconscious
history.

It is unsoiled. And yet everything cash can
do capital accomplishes just as well, and in fact more effectively, on a
vaster, more combustible scale. Ponzi schemes, toxic mortgages, credit default
swaps, economic blockades, money laundering rackets, even coup d’états and the
mass destruction of people and property are financed by intangible investment
assets.

The economic stability of entire countries now depends on gaining
control over capital’s circuitous fungibility made all the more evasive by its
digitized essence (no wonder cyber warfare has replaced terrorism as the number
one threat facing the nation-state). But just as everyday life becomes more
saturated by this grammar of finance, so too our existence visa vie the
political economy appears progressively more baffling and mysterious.

Enter “History Zero,” a new video work
by Stefanos Tsivopoulos. Part documentary, part narrative film “History Zero”
begins with a parable about forgetfulness and wealth before ultimately focusing
on the ongoing financial catastrophe in the artist’s birth country of Greece.

Selected by curator Syrago Tsiara to represent his nation for the 55th Venice
Biennale Tsivopoulos addresses capital’s paradoxical identity as both tangible
artifact and immaterial overlord, but does so without preaching or lecturing.
Tsivopoulos’s story is like a sailor’s knot in which relations between a young,
an old, and a middle-aged character are entangled by accident through the
disposal of a specific quantity of Origami flowers made out of paper money.

The
video opens with a wealthy art collector suffering from Alzheimer’s disease
disinterestedly tossing “wilted” paper blooms made out of Euros into a trash
bag. The video cuts and we see a precarious African immigrant gleaning scraps
off the streets of Athens who recovers the bag full of cash-blossoms.

Cut to
act three as a ruminating middle-aged artist (perhaps it is Tsivopoulos
himself?) actualizes the mysterious link between art and money when he manages
to sell a pile of urban refuse to the wealthy demented collector as a
significant work of contemporary art. Are we witnessing the death, rebirth, and
final demise of art as it is transformed from fantasy into medium of exchange,
and then back into a privileged object of useless contemplation?

Or is this the story of the life,
death, the rebirth of art as a realm of fantasy beyond the reach of
commodification?

Today, capital’s contradictions
materialize fully unconcealed within the world of contemporary art. Theorist
John Roberts argues artistic production is being subsumed directly into
capital’s “new cognitive relations of production.”

He is therefore interested in the ‘imagined’
and mediated memory of the past as constituting the contemporary consciousness
of the Diaspora and the formation of subjectivity in a state of displacement
and dislocation, without an ideally structured frame of reference.

History Zero

The display of archival material, with
the alternative ways of thinking and making political choices it implies, is
gaining ground in contemporary art. This is not just to do with an artist’s
intention to restore visibility to the traces of forgotten human experience
through their actual physical presence, but to propose, with the fervour of Hal
Foster in his seminal work An Archive Impulse in 2004, ways of seeing things
which undermine the values attributed to them historically. In this context we
could reflect on the self-cancelling banknotes, included in History 0, invented
by the German economist Silvio Gessel at the end of the 19th century, which
lost their value within a month after twelve stamps had been pasted onto them.
Are they any different from the flower banknotes made by the elderly collector?

In this, film and archive are parallel
and complementary conceptualizations of the central topic of History Zero which
is the complex, ever-changing and class-determined relationship we entertain to
money, and the mechanisms by which value is attributed, added, and taken away.
Useless scrap metal acquires the value of gold to the poor immigrant, banknotes
acquire the decorative value of paper flowers in the hands, and mind, of the
rich old collector, while an accidental discovery by the artist could obtain
irrational surplus value.

The film, as a living archive of the
future, records the discontinuity, the ruptures and the complexity of the
present economic regime and the contradictions of human experience within it. It
establishes new spaces for the imagination and for memory in which three
mutually exclusive states of mind take shape. Each story contains an element
which must be subverted in order for the next story to take place. The reversal
of the collector’s ‘logical’ relationship to objects permits the ‘salvation’ of
the immigrant and the realization of his dream, but only when he reverses his
survival strategy. For the artist, the “resignification” of his chance find,
his objet trouvé, asserts modernist artistic practice as assuming power over
meaning. Constant conceptual reversals and transgressions of meaning thus make
it possible for the film sequence to continue.

The archival material attempts to
restore the fragments of the story to an even, linear continuum. But does not
the archive itself contain an inherent arbitrariness? What else can we expect
from this collection of heterogeneous and fragmented material, but the
establishment of new conceptual connotations? If we want to go one step
further, film itself can potentially be inscribed in the wide repertoire of
choices for the use, fetishisation and devaluation of money which the archive
contains. Both archive and film share in the liberating power implicated in
dementia or paranoia as they try to see the world through different eyes, as
indeed art does overall. For Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge,
the act of constituting an archive is the measure of governability and control,
since the one who takes such an initiative, when conditions permit, controls
the meaning of ‘real’ scientific knowledge. If this is so, then for
contemporary artistic practice, archiving is like scraping off the ‘evident’
hermeneutical sediments, the established conceptualizations and cultural
inscriptions through which subjectivity is constructed.

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
returns, in 1995, to Freud’s realisation in ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing
Pad’ of 1925 that there is no political power without control of the archive,
if not of memory itself. The effective democratization of societies can be
calculated in relation to the degree of their participation in the formation
and interpretation of an archive. From this philosophical perspective an
international art exhibition like the Venice Biennale can also be seen as a
constantly evolving and growing archive of artistic choices, a palace of
encyclopaedic knowledge, according to the approach of this year’s curator
Massimiliano Gioni, of emotional and technological memory, a Pantheon of
experiences, dreams and reflections on the human condition, persistently being
re-inscribed, erased, and broadened. Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ History Zero
attempts to record its own trace in this field of active accumulation, going to
the core of the concept of value.

Can the surplus value of a dream be
calculated?

Syrago Tsiara Thessaloniki, March 2013

KG:
And what of the relationship of history and politics in your work? Chris Marker
once remarked that he was passionate about History and that politics interested
him only insofar

There were other works that followed such as the Lost Monument, (2009)
about the political and financial aid (intervention) ofthe United States during
the Greek Civil War (1945 –1949), in line with the so-called Truman Doctrine.
Later, in 1963, a Greek-American organization decided to donate a 4 meter
bronze statue of the American president Harry S. Truman to the Greeks. The
statue was installed in downtown Athens near the Greek parliament. I once
bumped into it and I first thought he was a Greek politician, but when I read
the carved marble inscription I realized, much to my surprise, that the biggest
statue in Athens was of an American president. I wanted to read more about its
history and found out that the statue’s sculptor was Felix de Welton, the
sculptor of the five marines raising the American flag in Iwo Jima. That’s when
I decided to make a work about the monument itself. I’m trying to connect the dots
and in this effort, which is ongoing, a very interesting picture starts to
emerge. It is about revisiting our collective memory or our collective amnesia,
where new reinterpretations provide new history. And here I am reminded of a
very interesting quote from Chris Marker: “We do not remember, we rewrite
memory as much as history is rewritten.”

KG:
Many
of your works refer to contested political moments, but to what extent do you
actually consider your work to be political and how do you understand the term
from your point of view as an artist?

ST: What I
define as a political work is one which can potentially generate a political
and social discourse and inspire audiences not only within the strict framework
of art institutions and art in general. In that respect I do not consider my
work political even thoughit deals with political moments from the recent
history of Greece. However this doesn’t mean that the work cannot potentially
create a political discourse in future times. For example the artist or the
curator of the future may find certain works political, capable of generatinga
political discourse. But that’s something we can never tell.

KG:
Research
is a very important partof your creative process. How do you go about
conducting your research, particularly—as you say—as so many incidents of
recent Greek history have been edited out of the history books and collective
memory, or deliberately ‘forgotten’, to suit the political status quo and the
national mythology. What is your relationship towards and view on this
so-called “archival turn” that has been so prevalent in much recent
contemporary art practice?

ST: In regard to
the “archival turn” I believe artists sense that we have hit a wall. As I
mentioned earlier, it seems there is nothing left to be seen. Everything has
been exposed. We do not need more new images. What we need is new vision. I
feel as if this palindromic movement between different times, past, present and
future, is like the automatic movement of the camera as it tries to focus on a
flat wall. That’s what happened to me. I felt that in order to see where I was
standing I first had to take a couple of steps back. Dealing with archives and
history calibrates our sense of the present and eventually gives purpose and
guidance for what is to come. Yes I do believe that history (not only Greek
history) has been edited and appropriated but that on many occasions this has
not necessarily happened deliberately. I was once in a discussion with an old
worker from the Greek National Television and he was mentioning the thousands
of hours of film footage from the 30s, 40s and 50s that was either neglected,
until it simply vanished, or was sold to television broadcasts of different
countries because its importance was either not acknowledged or there was no
money to maintain and make available such delicate material. This was a
revelation because I thought there must always have been a “deliberate reason”
behind such constructs as national mythology but this proved the opposite. It
revealed a significance that went beyond politics, reflecting, rather,a lack of
culture and education.

KG:
So
what about the work for the Greek Pavilion at the Venice Biennale? Is it
grounded more in history or in the present moment of crisis?

ST: History
Zero, is different from previous works. It is a film in three parts and a small
archive. The film was conceived in the summer of 2012 while I was in Athens and
working on another project. I stayed there for almost four months and that was
the longest I had stayed there in a long time. The centre of Athens is perhaps
the area where the effects of the crisis are most visible. The challenge for me
was to make a new work not about the crisis per se but to question what crisis
is, where it is generated, and to ask whether there is a way to resist by
adopting a different view of the crisis. The work questions the value of money,
and the archive is a collection of examples of alternative currencies where the
value of money is contested. So the work has a very strong anthropological and
associative look through the stories of three completely different individuals,
an old demented collector of contemporary art, an immigrant who collects scrap
metal, and an artist who collects images. Through seemingly realistic daily
routines, I wanted to set a series of questions about how their stories and
collections can be interconnected and how the actions of one affect the lives
of the others.

KG:
If,
as in the words of Robert Bresson, the practice of film-making is about making
visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen, what is it you
would like to make visible most in this work for Venice and in your work in
general?

ST: I think what
Bresson actually meant is a withdrawal from what’s expressed through form.
Actually I don’t think an artist has the power to make anything visible,
unfortunate as that might sound; nowadays everything is already there to be
seen. What art can do is to empower people to see in different ways, in new
ways, and give the opportunity to viewers to rethink for themselves what is
already there. There has been a lot of exposure to images and I wanted through
this work to embrace what is concealed. In History Zero the three separate
stories never meet directly, they only “meet” in the viewer’s mind or memory.
I’m mostly interested in this aspect of interconnectivity and that all actions
do have meaning and affect each other’s lives. The work deals with this greater
aspect of “what is at work”, what makes the world move. Many would argue that
it is money or the constant fluctuation of value. I think in essence it is
something else. And I’m very happy if this something else remains invisible and
has no name.

Artists have become handlers
of a sophisticated cultural apparatus that does not so much produce objects of
fine art, but instead generates networks, exposes social relations, and
embraces the redundancy of artistic labor itself. But in a dialectical flip
Roberts points out that “the capital-labor relation has become a transformative
and experimental space of opportunity for the new art.” 1 In a sense, by no
longer obscuring the bond between capital and culture —a link that has long been held as either nonexistent or
simply distasteful― contemporary art opens
up a singular space of self-critique. This is not a question of choice. Art
cannot help but reveal its internal relationship to the ongoing global
financial crisis and the precarious conditions of labor today, conditions
brought about by thirty years of neoliberal economic deregulation.

Perhaps this
explains why the mainstream art world is now infatuated with practices rooted
in collective production and social relations, even as its aggregate financial
value that reaches into the billions of Euros is increasingly concentrated into
fewer and fewer bank accounts?

Stefanos Tsivopoulos addresses these
developments almost as if reinterpreting Marx’s famous formula M-C-M
(money-commodity-money) as M-M-M (memory-money-memory). The three episodes of
“History Zero” do not resolve the artist’s inquiry into art and capital, but
rather keep it in suspension. And there is an encore.

The final section of the
video offers a visual archive of evidence about survival not from within
political economy, but below, besides, and apart from its uncompromising
discipline. We find images of metal coins reworked as portraits by homeless
unemployed men or “hobos” in the United States during the Great Depression of
the 1930s; informal systems of cash transfer using pre-paid mobile phone
minutes that are evolving in parts of Africa; and assorted “local currency”
systems haunting “History Zero’s” archive. It’s a theme Tsivopoulos has
explored before.

In his 2012 installation “I Rebel Therefore We Are” the artist
activated more than just paper documents by arranging manufactured products,
workers’ uniforms, even unspent rocket ammunition as an homage to French writer
Albert Camus, the fallen Catholic intellectual who once acknowledged that “a
work of art is an act of confession.” Tsivopoulos seemed intent on finding
divine intervention within overlooked and everyday objects. Glistening glass
tubes filled with raw industrial materials. Slabs of cast cement turned into
projection screens. Archival photographs borrowed from a local trade union
digitized —their pigments, silver and gelatin, replaced with invisible strings
of ones and zeros. In Tsivopoulos’s art light illuminates matter as much as
matter in turn reanimates memory. It is a world in which things rule, not
people. And things nowadays appear to be taking up arms.

“I Rebel Therefore We Are” and “History
Zero” are as much vows of intent as they are reports about the political
archive and the transmutation of capital. For coiled-up within the artist’s
sprawling accumulations of inert matter and archives of discarded assets something
that we once described as the truth lies in wait.

It is always about to strike.
But this neither intoxicates the artist, nor does it stop him. He goes on
sifting for clues, his amateur archeology intent on revealing moments of
sentimentality, nostalgia, melancholy, as well as memory, resentment, and
resistance. And then he moves on.